The primary objective of the Uttar Pradesh Pro-Poor Tourism Development Project is to ensure that the project addresses the adverse impacts on the livelihood of the people and that nobody is left worse- off after project implement and all local inhabitants, including those affected by the project, have access to project benefits, both during the construction as well as operation phase of the project.
... See More + Some of the negative impacts and mitigation measures include: erection of temporary enclosures around construction sites, to entrap some of the dust that is brought up during the excavation and construction phases thereby reducing air pollution; proper management and disposal of waste water, and erection of sound barriers around the construction site; Re-routing of traffic and parking at alternate site may be adopted as a mitigated measure. No road closure is envisaged during the civil works. The Resettlement Action Plan ensures to suggest appropriate mitigation measure against the issues/ concerns identified during the environmental and social impact assessment study. All the social issues were studied and have been substantiated using appropriate evidences to ascertain the magnitude of their impacts. Even the issues of public grievances and public notice have been taken care-off in the report to confirm transparency during the project implementation. It has been envisaged that post construction of the new, integration of the renovated and restored facilities with tourist movement, including the 71 shops and platforms and chabutaras for the vendors will provide them better livelihood opportunities thereby meeting the project objectives of pro-poor tourism of the Government of Uttar Pradesh.
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This paper examines gender gaps in cognitive and non-cognitive skills among a sample of more than 10,000 children between the ages of 6 and 9 in rural Indonesia.
... See More + In terms of cognitive skills, the analysis finds evidence of gender gaps favoring girls at each age in test scores of language (0.158-0.252 standard deviations) and mathematics (0.155-0.243 standard deviations) in the early years of primary school. Girls also perform significantly better than boys in non-cognitive skills, with higher scores on the social competence (0.086-0.247 standard deviations) and emotional maturity domains (0.213-0.296 standard deviations) of the Early Development Instrument, a finding consistent with research from high-income countries. Decomposition analyses are used to investigate the extent to which enrollment patterns in preschool and primary school as well as parenting practices contribute to these gender gaps in cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Standard decomposition approaches are extended to correct for selection on observables. The findings show that gender differences in enrollment patterns play a role in explaining gender gaps in test scores, while differences in parenting practices do not. However, the relative contribution of observed factors to gender gaps depends on the available quality of preschool services in the child’s village and whether the outcome of interest is cognitive or non-cognitive skills.
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Several economies have laws that treat women differently from men. This study explores the degree of such legal gender disparities across 167 economies around the world.
... See More + This is achieved by constructing a simple measure of legal gender disparities to evaluate how countries perform. The average number of overall legal gender disparities across 167 economies is 17, ranging from a minimum of 2 to a maximum of 44. The maximum possible legal gender disparities is 71. The measure is found to be correlated with other measures of gender inequality, implying the measure does capture gender inequality while also differing from preexisting measures of gender inequality. A high degree of legal gender disparities is found to be negatively associated with a wide range of outcomes, including years of education of women relative to men, labor force participation rates of women relative to men, proportion of women top managers, proportion of women in parliament, percentage of women that borrowed from a financial institution relative to men, and child mortality rates. Subcategories within the legal disparities measure help to uncover specific types of legal disparities across economies.
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This report presents findings from the baseline assessment of International Rescue Committee's (IRC) Girl Empower (GE) program in Nimba County, Liberia.
... See More + GE seeks to help 13 to 14 year-old girls make healthy life choices and decrease their risk of sexual abuse. The program centers on weekly meetings between girls and trained local mentors, during which the girls learn about life skills and financial literacy. GE also holds monthly discussion groups for participants' caregivers, and trains local health and psychosocial care providers on how to improve and expand services for survivors of gender-based violence. This baseline report is part of a cluster-randomized controlled trial, which aims to assess the program's impact 24 months after baseline. 21 percent of the baseline sample of 13-14 year-old females reported having previously had sex. Within this group, 29 percent indicated that their first sexual act was non-consensual. Among all GE girls, 37 percent reported having experienced sexual violence of some type, such as being physically forced to have sex, non-physically pressured (coerced/persuaded) to have sex, someone unsuccessfully attempting to have sex with them, and being touched in a sexual way. The levels of nonconsensual first sex and any experience of nonconsensual sex are at the high end of the range reported by the UNICEF Violence against Children Surveys (VACS) in Swaziland, Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe. As the VACS reporting is for (a variety of) age ranges, each of which is higher than that in this study, the levels of sexual violence reported here are very high in comparison.
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This paper studies the role of social-emotional or psychological capital in determining the education and employment aspirations of adolescent girls and young women in India.
... See More + The study finds that girls' self-efficacy and mental health are important determinants of their educational and employment aspirations, suggesting that these hidden forms of human capital may serve as critical targets for interventions aiming to alter girls' educational and economic trajectories. The study also identifies factors that correlate with girls' level of self-efficacy, and finds that an "enabling" and supportive family and community environment appears to be important.
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Analysis of household expenditure surveys since 2008 in 22 Sub-Saharan African countries shows that one-third of all people use electricity. As expected, users are disproportionately urban and rich.
... See More + In communities with access to electricity, lack of affordability is the greatest barrier to household connection. Lifeline rates enabling the poor to use grid electricity vary in availability, with six countries allowing 30 kilowatt-hours or less of electricity usage a month at low prices. Affordability challenges are aggravated by sharing of meters by several households -- denying them access to lifeline rates -- and high connection costs in many countries, made worse by demands from utility staff for bribes in some countries. Collection of detailed information on residential schedules enabled calculation of the percentage of total household expenditures needed for electricity at the subsistence and other levels. Affordability varied across countries, with grid electricity even at the subsistence level being out of reach for the poor in half the countries and even more so once connection charges are considered. Examination of the gender of the head of household shows that female-headed households are not disadvantaged in electricity use once income and the place of residence (urban or rural) are taken into account. However, female-headed households tend to be poorer, making it all the more important to focus on helping the poor for the goal of achieving universal access. Installing individual meters and subsidizing installation, encouraging prepaid metering so as to avoid disconnection and reconnection charges, reformulating lifeline blocks and rates as appropriate, and stamping out corruption to eliminate bribe-taking can all help the poor.
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This note summarizes the findings from the baseline survey for this impact evaluation, which was conducted between October 2013 and January 2014.
... See More + The baseline survey was conducted with girls interested in SOS, aged 12-15, who resided in the target communities, and whose guardians consented to the girl’s participation in SOS and the survey. In total, baseline data was collected from 2,884 girls and one guardian for each girl. These 2,884 girls form the ‘study sample.’ Half of these girls were then randomly selected to participate in the SOS program and became the ‘treatment group’, and the other half were kept as the ‘control group’. The extent to which our study results can reasonably represent the results one would expect for other girls in Greater Monrovia depends on how similar girls and households in the study sample are to a representative sample of Greater Monrovia. Analysis suggests that they are in fact quite similar.
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Decisions during youth have great long-term impacts on human development, which is key to poverty alleviation and economic development. During adolescence, two of the primary transitions are beginning a family and adopting a healthy lifestyle.
... See More + Youth face many choices and challenges around these key decisions, such as when to initiate sex, when to marry, when to have children, and whether to engage in risky behaviors â€“ all of which affect their future health and future opportunities. Consequences of these early decisions can have long-lasting effects on adolescents and their communities, potentially increasing public health costs and depleting human capital. This note briefly presents program and policy approaches that have been implemented in different contexts for addressing these two key transition periods of youth: beginning a family and adopting a healthy lifestyle. It concludes by presenting a set of programmatic lessons and investment recommendations based on the global evidence.
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International evidence indicates that keeping girls in school positively impacts their life trajectory and benefits the well-being of the next generation.
... See More + Malawi has made progress in increasing overall enrollment rates, but additional effort is still needed to ensure that adolescent girls stay in school and complete a quality education. Starting in the upper grades of primary school, adolescent girls are more likely to drop out of school than their male counterparts with pregnancy, early marriage, and school fees frequently cited as the main reasons. One of the key challenges in Malawi will be to both focus on girls before they reach puberty and ensure that they get the support they need to complete primary school and successfully transition to secondary school. Meanwhile, adolescent boys will also need support and guidance to invest in their own education and to value the education of their female peers as a way to build stronger families and communities and break the inter-generational cycle of poverty. The Government of Malawi will need to assess the effectiveness and sustainability of its policy and programs, including those by partners, to scale and consolidate accordingly in order to avoid a scattered approach.
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Vouchers stimulate demand for health care services by giving beneficiaries purchasing power. In turn, health facilities’ claims are reimbursed for providing beneficiaries with improved quality of health care.
... See More + Efficient strategies to generate demand from new, often poor, users and supply in the form of increased access and expanded scope of services would help move Uganda away from inequity and toward universal health care. A reproductive health voucher program was implemented in 20 western and southwest Ugandan districts from April 2008 to March 2012. Using three years of data, this impact evaluation study employed a quasi-experimental design to examine differences in utilization of health services among women in voucher and nonvoucher villages. Two key findings were a 16-percentage-point net increase in private facility deliveries and a decrease in home deliveries among women who had used the voucher, indicating the project likely made contributions to increase private facility births in villages with voucher clients. No statistically significant difference was seen between respondents from voucher and nonvoucher villages in the use of postnatal care services, or in attending four or more antenatal care visits. A net 33-percentage-point decrease in out-of-pocket expenditure at private facilities in villages with voucher clients was found, and a higher percentage of voucher users came from households in the two poorest quintiles. The greater uptake of facility births by respondents in voucher villages compared with controls indicates that the approach has the potential to accelerate service uptake. A scaled program could help to move the country toward universal coverage of maternal health care.
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Ratings for the Health Services Improvement Project for Lao were as follows: outcomes were moderately unsatisfactory, the risk to development outcome was moderate, the Bank performance was moderately satisfactory, and the Borrower performance was also moderately satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned included: bank task team presence in-country was crucial to ensure adequate project preparation and enable smooth implementation of project activities. A stronger focus on social behavioral change and communication, greater community involvement in health service provision and/or management, and interventions to address social and cultural barriers to health service utilization, in addition to the demand-side financing activities employed by the project, are necessary to ensure households, especially poor households, know when and why to seek and actually access health care when needed. Moreover, physical access to remotecommunities that can be challenging and costly, especially during the rainy season, and decision making autonomy of women and gender mismatches between health providers and patients are important factors that need to be addressed to improve service utilization. Pro-poor project design does not necessarily lead to a reduction of inequalities in health service utilization (and ultimately health outcomes). Despite key project design features associated with intentionally targeting the poor, some inequalities in health service utilization may have actually widened during the project duration (as evidenced by higher utilization of free MNCH services by non-poor compared with the poor). A key lesson for future projects may nevertheless be to specifically analyze the determinants’ health outcomes/health service utilization inequality, including indicators in the monitoring framework for the tracking and monitoring of inequality.
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Rule of Law is a theoretical concept social scientists use to describe a political order where laws are predictable and applied equally to all citizens, regardless of their political or economic influence.
... See More + However, the drafting and implementation of laws and regulations compatible with principles of the Rule of Law depend on the incentives that lawmakers, implementing agencies, and ruling elites have. Realigning the incentive structures among key actors and organizations is therefore necessary to improve the chances for Rule-of-Law institutions to take root. Building the capacity of organizations without first changing institutional incentives is likely to lead to perverse outcomes, with the capacity ultimately channeled toward goals the reformers never envisioned. This book tells the story of how Rule of Law is applied in some countries in the Middle East and North Africa region.
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This study looks at how a community event—adolescent women's economic and social empowerment -- and a family factor -- sibling sex composition—interact in shaping gender differences in preferences for competition.
... See More + To do so, a lab-in-the-field experiment is conducted using competitive games layered over the randomized rollout of a community program that empowered adolescent girls in Uganda. In contrast with the literature, the study finds no gender differences in competitiveness among adolescents, on average. It also finds no evidence of differences in competitiveness between girls in treatment and control communities, on average. However, in line with the literature, in control communities the study finds that boys surrounded by sisters are less competitive. Strikingly, this pattern is reversed in treatment communities, where boys surrounded by (empowered) sisters are more competitive.
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The World Bank’s Africa Region Gender Innovation Lab (GIL) sits squarely at the intersection of policy and operations. Our aim is to enable project teams and policymakers to advocate for better gender integration from a position of evidence.
... See More + In close collaboration with project teams, the GIL designs, launches, and oversees impact evaluations of new interventions to generate knowledge on which policies work (or not) for closing gender gaps in the economic sectors. We also conduct impact evaluation workshops and other capacity building activities, so that others can contribute to and better interpret the knowledge base. Finally, authors leverage the evidence to promote the uptake of effective gender policies throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
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To explain persistent gender gaps in market outcomes, a lab experimental literature explores whether women and men have innate differences in ability (or attitudes or preferences), and a separate field-based literature studies discrimination against women in market settings.
... See More + This paper posits that even if women have comparable innate ability, their relative performance may suffer in the market if the task requires them to interact with others in society, and they are subject to discrimination in those interactions. The paper tests these ideas using a large-scale field experiment in 142 Malawian villages where men or women were randomly assigned the task of learning about a new agricultural technology, and then communicating it to others to convince them to adopt it. Although female communicators learn and retain the new information just as well, and those taught by women experience higher farm yields, the women are not as successful at teaching or convincing others to adopt the new technology. Micro-data on individual interactions from 4,000 farmers in these villages suggest that other farmers perceive female communicators to be less able, and are less receptive to the women's messages. Relatively small incentives for rewards undo the disparity in performance by encouraging added interactions, improving farmers' accuracy about female communicators' relative skill.
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As the World’s Premier Fund for the poorest and ‘an absolutely critical element inDevelopment’ IDA is uniquely positioned to help realize the ambition of eradicating poverty by 2030.
... See More + The ambitious development agenda set in 2015 signifies the desire of the global community to usher in a world free of poverty and hunger; a world that is peaceful and equitable; a world that is free of gender inequality; and a world that cares for its natural resources and environment. In the context of World Bank Group’s Forward Look, a results-focused IDA has the capacity, experience, and the instruments to be the platform for transformational changes that ensure that no one is left behind. With just 15 years to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), every year counts. The ambitious 2030 development agenda calls for a paradigm shift. A beginning was made at the first IDA18 Replenishment meeting when Participants selected ‘toward 2030: investing in growth, resilience and opportunity’ as the overarching theme. This theme underscores both the urgency and the need for a comprehensive approach to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change and fragility on development and encourages actions to foster growth, equality and better governance so that poverty can be reduced and prosperity shared by all. A credible implementation plan must, therefore, include a strong policy and financial package to undertake large investments that can shift the development trajectory to deliver results by 2030. Spearheading the multilateral efforts, IDA18 presents a set of policy and financing commitments to match the global ambition.
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A new World Bank Group (WBG) gender strategy (December 2015) reflects changes in the global landscape and in the accumulation of evidence of what works to close gender gaps.
... See More + The 2015 WBG gender strategy recognizes that stronger and better-resourced efforts are needed to address key gaps between females and males, in IDA countries and beyond. The WBG, through IDA, is uniquely suited to provide strategic support for work to close gaps between men and women, which is a complex task linked across sectors, requiring sustained long-term effort. By its nature, closing opportunity and outcome gaps between men and women requires working across many sectors, highlighting the inter-linkages across the IDA special themes. Under IDA18, IDA presents policy actions in five areas: target remaining gender gaps in human endowments; remove constraints for more and better jobs; increase financial inclusion; build the evidence base and address issues of voice and agency; and build the evidence base and address issues of voice and agency.
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